Does everyone know Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices? It’s a part of MSDN Library (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff921345) where Microsoft publishes some deep dive articles (some would rather say - “books”) where you can find out how to deal with interesting topics using Microsoft technologies. My favorite (so far) publications in P&P are:

Project Silk (I didn’t have time to go through it completely, but what I’ve seen so far seems very useful)

Anyway, I’m not going to lead you through the old content. I’d like to encourage you to check the latest addition to P&P: "CQRS Journey".

CQRS stands for Command & Query Responsibility Segregation (some know it as CQS - Command-Query Separation) and is a simple principle that claims that each function (method) has to be either a command (action that is able to modify the data) or query (question, that can’t change an answer). That doesn’t look like a game-changer and most likely some of you already design their code that way (honestly - I did, even before I’ve heard the acronym “CQRS” for the first time), but if you don’t - make sure that you check that article on Martin Fowler’s bliki: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CQRS.html